Welles scares nation - Oct 30, 1938 - HISTORY.com Welles scares nation Publisher A+E Networks Orson Welles causes a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds”—a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth. Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause. The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on.

But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway. Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake.

Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.” The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth.

Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!” When news of the real-life panic leaked into the CBS studio, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was just fiction. There were rumors that the show caused suicides, but none were ever confirmed. The Federal Communications Commission investigated the program but found no law was broken. Networks did agree to be more cautious in their programming in the future. Orson Welles feared that the controversy generated by “War of the Worlds” would ruin his career. In fact, the publicity helped land him a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane—a movie that many have called the greatest American film ever made.

Related Videos War of the Worlds - Radiolab Radiolab More In our very first live hour, we take a deep dive into one of the most controversial moments in broadcasting history: Orson Welles' 1938 radio play about Martians invading New Jersey. "The War of the Worlds" caused panic when it originally aired, and it's continued to fool people since--from Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador. Correction: In this program, we referred twice to the fact that 12 million people heard the "The War of the Worlds" broadcast when it was first aired in 1938. However, no one knows for sure how many people were listening. We also said that the FCC Commissioner referred to Orson Welles as a “radio terrorist.” However, that quote comes from November 1937, 11 months prior to the War of the Worlds broadcast, when FCC Commissioner George Henry Payne protested against radio broadcasts that "produced terrorism and nightmares among children.” Additional audio has been added to the program to address these issues. Guests: The War Of The Worlds. 1938 Radio Broadcast: Mercury Theatre, H. G.

Wells, Orson Welles: 9789568351298: Amazon.com: Books The War Of The Worlds. 1938 Radio Broadcast Read more Read less Best Books of 2016 Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for the best books of the year in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more. Customers also viewed these available items Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. $8.99 Prime Special Offers and Product Promotions Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Ignite your imagination with these editor's picks from Kindle books.

See more Product Details Publisher: 1 edition (July 15, 2005) Language: English Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 4.8 x 5.5 inches Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces 5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest misunderstandings of all time ByA customeron May 11, 2000 This is the actual radi broadcast made in the 30s, and I can see where people could get the idea of the story being real. The details are authentic to the period and it really sounds like those old radio news shows from the time. The plot follows the H.G. Wells classic with minor changes, like the introduction of airplanes in the futile defense of... New York City! Yes, there are changes that yould make this little joke seem more real to an American radio audience. By Donna Di Giacomo VINE VOICE on June 23, 2005 Ahh, the days when there was no such thing as television and people had to use their <gasp!> imaginations while listening to the radio.

I am 29 years old and I love collecting old radio programs, especially the "Suspense" series. I'm fascinated that people could write well enough to keep a listening audience's attention for a full thirty minutes and make them want to keep listening until the end. I have great respect for the actors and actresses of the era when radio was king as it takes a lot of talent to let your voice do the acting. Today, an "actor" or "actress" can get away with being attractive and being a bigger hit with trashy tabloids more than at the box office. It is well known how much people were freaked out by this broadcast (so much so that the FCC launched an investigation including looking at whether or not Welles and his fellow actors were not part of some conspiracy to create such a hysteria) and, while listening to this, it's easy to imagine channel surfing on the evening of October 30, 1938 and catching the program well after Welles stated the obvious: That it was a radio play based on the H.G. Wells novel of the same title.

It was authentic in that it included the names of men in FDR's cabinet and picked out small towns in Northern New Jersey where Martians initially landed. And, as another reviewer previosuly pointed out, the show was done in the same format that radio news shows were done then, so for those who missed Orson's explanation of the program, they were bound to think this was the real thing happening at that place and at that time. Unfortunately, the mass hysteria and publicity (dare I say infamy?) was no doubt a jinx on the talented Welles. True, he made the mighty classic "Citizen Kane" in 1941 but, apart from that, he was, and still is, remembered as the guy who made people think that the world was really being attacked by Martians. Near the end of his life he made a comment on his career, "I started at the top and worked my way to the bottom." It's a shame things turned out the way they did for Welles but one thing's for sure, he sure stirred up plenty of mischief on that Mischief Night in 1938. By DAVID G.

on March 6, 2012 Format: Audio Cassette|Verified Purchase The item came quickly, w/in a week of the order I have an replica old-time wooden radio that plays only cassettes. Cassettes are getting harder to find these days. The price was low, as it is a cassette. The program is from the October 30, 1938 broadcast of Mercury Theater's "War of the Worlds." It is infamous, and is recorded in entirety. However, you do have to remove the cassette and play "side B" to hear the broadcast in its entirety. The tape is roughly an 60 minutes long. The sound is somewhat "scratchy" and the audio needs to be cleaned-up a little, but the broadcast can be heard clearly enough, and worth the few bucks you spend on the tape. This is piece of broadcast history! Welles genius was to tell H.G. Well's tale in a "real" news-format. Thousands believed it was true! There are still stories around about water towers with buck-shot holes from people shooting them, thinking they were Martian Machines!

Police found parents in the Holland Tunnel with guns to their children's heads, believing the Martians were coming to get them! Whether your a sci-fi enthusiast, a radio buff, or want tio start your own Halloween tradition, get this on tape or on CD. You can't go wrong. A Kid's Reviewon June 6, 2003 Format: Audio CD Halloween, 1938. It did'nt seem to dawn on people listening to this radio broadcast that it was only a phony hoax and Halloween prank being pulled on everyone. Why ? In the wake of World War 2, the most convincing form of communication and media was not television, but radio. Over the radio, an elaborate and powerfully charged broadcast like this could easily fool hundreds. And it did. Orson Welles, a familiar icon of cinema, narrated the events, in nearly journalistic fashion. His voice and his attention to details of the alien invasion frightened people and assured them that indeed they were being invaded by flying saucers. This radio broadcast was inspired by the H.G. Well's novel "War of the Worlds", which was the first science fiction novel to consider the possibility or theory or idea of aliens.

War of the Worlds also became a highly successful film in the 50's, one of the many drive-through films in which people enjoyed to see special effects at the time and full of camp horror. For antique collectors and fans of the genre, this is a must have. War of the Worlds in its original contents on the radio broadcast, Orson Welles as narrator, is heaven for fans. Orson Welles, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, March 1, 1937. Photo by Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. “Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,” narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program. The panic inspired by Welles made War of the Worlds perhaps the most notorious event in American broadcast history. That’s the story you already know—it’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories.

With actors dramatizing the reaction of frightened audience members (based on contemporaneous letters), the new documentary, part of PBS’s American Experience series, reinforces the notion that naïve Americans were terrorized by their radios back in 1938. So did this weekend’s episode of NPR’s Radiolab, which opened with the assertion that on Oct. 30, 1938, “The United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we’ve never seen before.” There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. Advertisement How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.

In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.” Get Slate in your inbox. The contrast between how newspaper journalists experienced the supposed panic, and what they reported, could be stark. In 1954, Ben Gross, the New York Daily News’ radio editor, published a memoir in which he recalled the streets of Manhattan being deserted as his taxi sped to CBS headquarters just as War of the Worlds was ending. Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across this legendary cover a few hours later. New York Daily News front page from Oct. 31, 1938. Photo by New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images From these initial newspaper items on Oct.

31, 1938, the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling. A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case. Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. “To what program are you listening?” the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio “play” or “the Orson Welles program,” or something similar indicating CBS. None said a “news broadcast,” according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising.

Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show. Advertisement The new PBS documentary allows that, “of the tens of millions of Americans listening to their radios that Sunday evening, few were tuned to the War of the Worlds” when it began, due to Bergen’s popularity. But the documentary’s script goes on to claim that “millions of listeners began twirling the dial” when the opening comedy routine on the Chase and Sanborn Hour gave way to a musical interlude. “Just at that moment thousands, hundreds, we don't how many listeners, started to dial-surf, where they landed on the Mercury Theatre on the Air,” explained Radiolab this weekend. No scholar, however, has ever isolated or extrapolated an actual number of dial twirlers. The data collected was simply not specific enough for us to know how many listeners might have switched over to Welles—just as we can’t estimate how many people turned their radios off, or switched from Mercury Theatre on the Air over to NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour either.

(Radiolab played the Chase and Sanborn Hour’s musical interlude for its audience, as if the song itself constituted evidence that people of course switched to Welles’ broadcast.) Both American Experience and Radiolab also omit the salient fact that several important CBS affiliates (including Boston’s WEEI) pre-empted Welles’ broadcast in favor of local commercial programming, further shrinking its audience. CBS commissioned a nationwide survey the day after the broadcast, and network executives were relieved to discover just how few people actually tuned in. “In the first place, most people didn’t hear it,” CBS’s Frank Stanton recalled later . “But those who did hear it, looked at it is as a prank and accepted it that way.” The legend of the panic, however, grew exponentially over the following years. In 1940, an esteemed academic solidified the myth in the public mind. Relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion, The Invasion From Mars , by Princeton’s Hadley Cantril, estimated that about 1 million people were “frightened” by War of the Worlds.

But the AIPO survey, as Cantril himself admitted, offered an audience rating “over 100 per cent higher than any other known measure of this audience.” Cantril defended his reliance on AIPO data by noting that it surveyed homes without telephones and small communities often overlooked by radio ratings agencies. But this cherry-picked data set was clearly tainted by the sensationalistic newspaper publicity following the broadcast (a possibility Cantril also admitted). Worse, Cantril committed an obvious categorical error by conflating being “frightened,” “disturbed,” or “excited” by the program with being “panicked.” In the late 1930s, radio audiences were regularly “excited” and “frightened” by suspenseful dramas. But what supposedly set Welles’ show apart was the “panic,” and even terror, it instilled in its audience. Was the small audience that listened to War of the Worlds excited by what they heard? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean they ran into the streets fearing for the fate of humanity. And yet such behavior has become part of the War of the Worlds myth, as highlighted by the PBS program.

“As Welles ran out the broadcast, the deluge of calls continued to light up switchboards across the country,” narrator Oliver Platt explains. “In some quarters there were even vague reports of suicides and panic-related deaths.” But just as the size of Welles’ audience has been exaggerated, so have reports of audience hysteria. Wire service reports did relay sensational stories of (unnamed) panicked listeners saved only by the timely intervention of friends or neighbors, but not one newspaper reported a verified suicide connected to the broadcast. Researchers in Princeton’s Office of Radio Research, working under the direction of Cantril, sought to verify a rumor that several people were treated for shock at St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark, N.J. The rumor was checked and found to be inaccurate. When the same researchers surveyed six New York City hospitals six weeks after the broadcast, “none of them had any record of any cases brought in specifically on account of the broadcast.” No specific death has ever been conclusively attributed to the drama. The Washington Post reported that one Baltimore listener died of a heart attack during the show, but unfortunately no one followed up to confirm the story or provide corroborative details.

One particularly frightened listener did sue CBS for $50,000, claiming the network caused her “nervous shock.” Her lawsuit was quickly dismissed. Advertisement “By the next morning ... the panic broadcast was front-page news from coast to coast, with reports of traffic accidents, near riots, hordes of panicked people in the streets, all because of a radio play,” the PBS documentary recounts. But did armed citizens and National Guardsmen really assemble throughout America? Did mobs rove the streets? Not really. While newspapers made Oct. 30, 1938, a memorable night in the history of the United States, in reality it was a normal fall Sunday evening throughout North America. Four days after its initial, sensational report, the Washington Post published a letter from one reader who walked down F Street during the broadcast. He noticed “nothing approximating mass hysteria.” “In many stores radios were going, yet I observed nothing whatsoever of the absurd supposed ‘terror of the populace.’ There was none,” the reader reported. The Chicago Tribune made no mention of frightened mobs taking to the Windy City’s streets.

If War of the Worlds had in fact caused the widespread terror we’ve been told it did, you’d expect CBS and Welles to have been reprimanded for their actions. But that wasn’t the case. It’s true that Federal Communications Commission chairman Frank McNinch quickly obtained informal agreement from the radio networks that fictional news “flashes” would not be used again, but no official rulings or regulations were promulgated. Nor were CBS or Welles sanctioned in any manner. (In fact, the FCC prohibited complaints about the program from being used in license renewal hearings.) For the FCC and the networks, the sensationalized newspaper reports were at worst a nuisance. Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” remains far more significant in the history of broadcast regulation than Orson Welles’ trickery. In 2012, Cathleen O’Connell, the producer and director of the PBS documentary, telephoned one of the authors of this piece (Michael Socolow) to discuss the recent scholarship questioning the scale of the panic.

The documentary does acknowledge this new work but relegates it to one line, late in the program: “Ultimately,” Oliver Platt intones, “the very extent of the panic would come to be seen as having been exaggerated by the press.” Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” remains far more significant in the history of broadcast regulation than Orson Welles’ trickery. But that one line fails to balance the accounts of hysteria peppered throughout the script. Director and Welles collaborator Peter Bogdanovich tells us that Welles “scared half the country.” The documentary further claims that “newspaper coverage about the broadcast ... continued unabated for two full weeks and amounted to some 12,500 articles in total.” Yet in his comprehensive analysis of contemporaneous reporting on the panic, American University professor W. Joseph Campbell found that almost all newspapers swiftly dropped the story.

“Coverage of the broadcast faded quickly from the front pages, in most cases after just a day or two,” Campbell writes, arguing that had the hysteria truly been widespread, “newspapers for days and even weeks afterward could have been expected to have published detailed reports about the dimensions and repercussions of such an extraordinary event.” Much like the broadcast itself, newspaper coverage was dramatic and sensational—but ephemeral. The PBS documentary, like so many accounts of War of the Worlds before it, can’t resist the allure of the myth. Advertisement * * * Why is this myth so alluring—why does it persist? The answer is complicated, most likely reflecting everything from the structure of our commercial broadcasting system and of our federal regulation, as well as our culture’s skepticism about the mass audience and the fear that always accompanies the excitement of new media. Even today, broadcast networks must convince advertisers that they retain commanding powers over their audiences. As such, CBS has regularly celebrated the War of the Worlds broadcast and its supposed effect on the public.

In 1957, Studio One, a CBS anthology series, dramatized the panic as “ The Night America Trembled ,” and when the network celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2003, War of the Worlds was a noted highlight . On the other side of the coin, federal regulators must still persuade politicians that there exists an important protective role for the guardians of the airwaves. For both broadcasters and regulators, War of the Worlds provides excellent evidence to justify their claims about media power. Some portion of the blame must also go to Hadley Cantril. His scholarly book validated the popular memory of the event. He gave academic credence to the panic and attached real numbers to it. He remains the only source with academic legitimacy who claims there was a sizable panic. Without this validation, the myth likely would not be in social psychology and mass communication textbooks, as it still is today—pretty much every high schooler and liberal arts undergraduate runs across it at some point. (Both the American Experience and Radiolab segments rely on his work.) Though you may have never heard of Cantril, the War of the Worlds myth is very much his legacy.

But the myth also persists because it so perfectly captures our unease with the media's power over our lives. "The ‘panic broadcast’ may be as much a function of fantasy as fact," writes Northwestern’s Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media , suggesting that the panic myth is a function of simple displacement: It’s not the Martians invading Earth that we fear, he argues; it’s ABC, CBS, and NBC invading and colonizing our consciousness that truly frightens us. To Sconce, the panic plays a “symbolic function” for American culture—we retell the story because we need a cautionary tale about the power of media. And that need has hardly abated: Just as radio was the new medium of the 1930s, opening up exciting new channels of communication, today the Internet provides us with both the promise of a dynamic communicative future and dystopian fears of a new form of mind control; lost privacy; and attacks from scary, mysterious forces. This is the fear that animates our fantasy of panicked hordes—both then and now.

War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast Causes Panic War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast Causes Panic 1930 - 1939 War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast Causes Panic American actor, producer, and director Orson Welles speaks into a microphone during a broadcast of his CBS radio program, 'First Person Singular'. Welles wears headphones and holds a pipe. (circa 1938). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Share By Jennifer Rosenberg On Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of radio listeners were shocked when radio news alerts announced the arrival of Martians. They panicked when they learned of the Martians' ferocious and seemingly unstoppable attack on Earth . Many ran out of their homes screaming while others packed up their cars and fled. Though what the radio listeners heard was a portion of Orson Welles ' adaptation of the well-known book, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, many of the listeners believed what they heard on the radio was real. The Idea Before the era of T.V., people sat in front of their radios and listened to music, news reports, plays and various other programs for entertainment.

In 1938, the most popular radio program was the "Chase and Sanborn Hour," which aired on Sunday evenings at 8 p.m. The star of the show was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Unfortunately for the Mercury group, headed by dramatist Orson Welles, their show, "Mercury Theatre on the Air," aired on another station at the very same time as the popular "Chase and Sanborn Hour." Welles, of course, tried to think of ways to increase his audience, hoping to take away listeners from the "Chase and Sanborn Hour." continue reading below our video 10 Best Universities in the United States For the Mercury group's Halloween show that was to air on October 30, 1938, Welles decided to adapt H. G. Wells's well-known novel, War of the Worlds , to radio. Radio adaptations and plays up to this point had often seemed rudimentary and awkward. Instead of lots of pages as in a book or through visual and auditory presentations as in a play, radio programs could only be heard (not seen) and were limited to a short period of time (often an hour, including commercials).

Thus, Orson Welles had one of his writers, Howard Koch , rewrite the story of War of the Worlds. With multiple revisions by Welles, the script transformed the novel into a radio play. Besides shortening the story, they also updated it by changing the location and time from Victorian England to present day New England . These changes reinvigorated the story, making it more personal for the listeners. The Broadcast Begins On Sunday, October 30, 1938 at 8 p.m., the broadcast began when an announcer came on the air and said, "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells." Orson Welles then went on the air as himself, setting the scene of the play: "We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own..." As Orson Welles finished his introduction, a weather report faded in, stating that it came from the Government Weather Bureau.

The official sounding weather report was quickly followed by "the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra" from the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York. Actually, the broadcast was all done from the studio, but the script led people to believe that there were announcers, orchestras, newscasters and scientists on the air from a variety of locations. Interview With an Astronomer The dance music was soon interrupted by a special bulletin announcing that a professor at the Mount Jennings Observatory in Chicago , Illinois reported seeing explosions on Mars . The dance music resumed until it was interrupted again, this time by a news update in the form of an interview with astronomer, Professor Richard Pierson at the Princeton Observatory in Princeton, New Jersey. The script specifically attempts to make the interview sound real and occurring right at that moment. Near the beginning of the interview, the newsman, Carl Phillips, tells the listeners that "Professor Pierson may be interrupted by telephone or other communications. During this period he is in constant touch with the astronomical centers of the world . . . Professor, may I begin your questions?" During the interview, Phillips tells the audience that Professor Pierson had just been handed a note, which was then shared with the audience.

The note stated that a huge shock "of almost earthquake intensity" occurred near Princeton. Professor Pierson believes it might be a meteorite. A Meteorite Hits Grovers Mill Another news bulletin announces, "It is reported that at 8:50 p.m. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton." Carl Phillips begins reporting from the scene at Grovers Mill. (No one listening to the program questions the very short time that it took Phillips to reach Grovers Mill from the observatory. The music interludes seem longer than they are and confuse the audience as to how much time has passed.) The meteor turns out to be a 30-yard wide metal cylinder that is making a hissing sound. Then the top began to "rotate like a screw." Then Carl Phillips reported what he witnessed: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. . . . Wait a minute! Someone's crawling. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be . . .

good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another one, and another one. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The Invaders Attack Carl Phillips continued to describe what he saw. Then, the invaders took out a weapon. A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame! Now the whole field's caught fire. The woods . . . the barns . . . the gas tanks of automobiles . . it's spreading everywhere.

It's coming this way. About twenty yards to my right... Then silence. A few minutes later, an announcer interrupts, Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just one moment please. At least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The audience is stunned by this news. But the situation soon gets worse. They are told that the state militia is mobilizing, with seven thousand men, and surrounding the metal object. They, too, are soon obliterated by the "heat ray." The President Speaks The "Secretary of the Interior," who sounds like President Franklin Roosevelt (purposely), addresses the nation. Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. . . . we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.

The radio reports that the U.S. Army is engaged. The announcer declared that New York City is being evacuated. The program continues, but many radio listeners are already panicked. The Panic Though the program began with the announcement that it was a story based on a novel and there were several announcements during the program that reiterated that this was just a story, many listeners didn't tune in long enough to hear them. A lot of the radio listeners had been intently listening to their favorite program the "Chase and Sanborn Hour" and turned the dial, like they did every Sunday, during the musical section of the "Chase and Sanborn Hour" around 8:12. Usually, listeners turned back to the "Chase and Sanborn Hour" when they thought the musical section of the program was over. However, on this particular evening they were shocked to hear another station carrying news alerts warning of an invasion of Martians attacking Earth. Not hearing the introduction of the play and listening to the authoritative and real sounding commentary and interviews, many believed it to be real. All across the United States, listeners reacted. Thousands of people called radio stations, police and newspapers. Many in the New England area loaded up their cars and fled their homes.

In other areas, people went to churches to pray. People improvised gas masks. Miscarriages and early births were reported. Deaths, too, were reported but never confirmed. Many people were hysterical. They thought the end was near. People Are Angry That It Was Fake Hours after the program had ended and listeners had realized that the Martian invasion was not real, the public was outraged that Orson Welles had tried to fool them. Many people sued. Others wondered if Welles had caused the panic on purpose. The power of radio had fooled the listeners. They had become accustomed to believing everything they heard on the radio, without questioning it. Now they had learned - the hard way. The War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast The War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. So began one of the most famous radio broadcasts of all time: the October 30, 1938 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Whenever Halloween rolls around, I always get in the mood to listen to the so-called "Panic Broadcast".

It's one of my favouite radio shows. Not only is it a great program by itself, but I'm also fascinated by the story around it. Not the story that's usually told, however, but the far more interesting truth behind what we all think we know about the "Panic Broadcast." Most people know the broad strokes of the popular story. On the evening before Halloween, the Mercury Theater on the Air starring Orson Welles performed a radio version of the popular science fiction story. What set the War of the Worlds broadcast apart from other shows the Mercury Theatre produced was its script, written by Howard Koch with input from Welles. Koch and Welles decided to use what was at the time an uncommon trick for creating realism: they framed the audio play as if it were itself a totally different radio broadcast experiencing a series of journalistic interruptions to the normal nightly entertainment. What happened next is widely told today in books, in television documentaries, and online: many people tuned in after the show began and, lacking the context of the intro, assumed they actually were listening to news reports about New Jersey being invaded by Martians. This triggered a night of chaos as listeners panicked about the arrival of the interplanetary menace.

People fled their homes; people flocked to churches; people called the police; people grabbed their guns; people contemplated suicide; all because of a fake news broadcast about Martian invaders. The event created a social and political firestorm that threatened the radio industry's very existence. Within a few days, newspapers were reporting that "literally MILLIONS OF PEOPLE understood the broadcast to be REAL". A flurry of lawsuits was filed against CBS. Congressional hearings were declared, and regulations were imposed forbidding stations from airing fake news broadcasts. The Panic Broadcast has since become a morality tale for broadcasting, a warning against the misuse of the great power that media wields over the public. At least, that's the way it's told. But how could reasonable people accept a fantastic event like Martian invaders as real? Before we answer that question, we need to ask a different question, one often asked here on Skeptoid: did it really happen the way it's told? In fact, it probably didn't. Several researchers over the years have looked at the Panic Broadcast story and found the actual evidence for a supposed mass panic to be lacking.

Instead, the known evidence suggests that any panic was small and localized, probably to the areas around New York City and New Jersey, the principal locations menaced in the broadcast. Outside of those areas, the most common reaction people had to the panic was to try and call either authorities or their loved ones in the affected areas. This resulted in jammed phone lines at a time when the phone system wasn't built to handle a high volume of simultaneous calls. Further, most attempts to confirm stories about the mass panic have come up at best inconclusive. Even in the months immediately following the broadcast, for example, attempts to gather reports from hospitals in New Jersey and New York about radio-induced panic-related injuries or stress turned up empty despite many claims of injuries sustained by individuals during the panic. And recollections of those involved in the night's panic, including law enforcement officers and station executives, have varied wildly in their mostly unconfirmable details about how widespread the panic actually was. A key problem with the story as it's usually told is the suggestion that "millions" of listeners were taken in by the fake broadcast. Not that many people were actually listening to the show.

A ratings firm conducting calls on the night of the Panic Broadcast determined that only about 2% of American homes were listening in, many from the beginning (meaning they wouldn't have mistaken the show for a real event). And despite the popular claim that "many" homes turned the dial to CBS during a musical interlude on the popular Chase and Sandborn Hour, there's no hard evidence to back up this suggestion. It's more of an after-the-fact hypothesis for why listeners might have missed the beginning of the broadcast generated from a few after-the-fact anecdotes. Not to mention that listeners changing stations had plenty of other stations they might have landed on, stations uninterrupted by Martian invaders. Yes, there were some people who were taken in by the Panic Broadcast. But they likely numbered in the thousands, not the millions, and they probably didn't remain panicked for long. So why do we all think that the country lost its collective gourd on the evening of October 30th, 1938? Because the newspapers of the day reported it that way. In an ironic twist of history, the newspapers may have been responsible for ginning up a panic over the power of radio, the very thing they were accusing of ginning up a panic.

The reason? Advertising revenues, which had declined drastically for the newspaper industry. Here's how Michael Socolow and Jefferson Pooley explained it in a 2008 article for Slate: Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In other words, the newspapers viewed radio in 1938 the same way they've viewed Internet journalism in recent years: as a threat to their bottom line. A radio broadcast mimicing a news broadcast for the sake of entertainment was an easy target and so the newspapers mounted a veritable crusade against radio in their coverage. They reported every story they heard, plastered bombastic headlines across the front pages, and published editorials demanding heavy government regulation — all hoping to drive people back to newspapers. Their crusade was helped along by Welles himself, who saw self-promotional opportunity in the hype. Why go along with such a damaging story? Because nothing bad actually resulted from it.

There was a lot of harumphing and a few proposed laws, but Welles didn't lose his place on the air — he was back performing Heart of Darkness a week later — and his radio show picked up its first sponsor within a few weeks of the broadcast. None of the lawsuits filed ever amounted to anything as the show hadn't actually violated any laws. All that happened was that Welles became the center of media attention while the entire nation talked at length about his radio program. In fact, Welles used the notoriety to gain a two-film contract with RKO Pictures, which led to the filming of Citizen Kane (a film that, perhaps fittingly, was a criticism of the newspaper industry). Another culprit in the modern perception of the Panic Broadcast was the 1940 book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, which confirmed a lot of the newspaper's version of events. The book was very popular at the time of its release, as it presented its research in a dramatic way that made for good reading. However, significant methodological problems have been cited in the book.

For one thing, 100 out of the 135 people interviewed were self-selected — they claimed to have been frightened and volunteered to talk with the researchers, with no effort made to confirm their anecdotes or to determine if they were engaging in after-the-fact me-too behavior. For another, the book relied on questionable data to place the number of people panicked by the broadcast at one million, a number that almost certainly exaggerates the extent of the panic. As it was widely read, however, The Invasion from Mars established much of the Panic Broadcast narrative we know today. Okay, so let's go back to our original question: overblown or not, there were a number of people that night who panicked. Why did they? Theories have been floated over the years about how the newness of radio, the economic stress of the Depression, and the rumors of war in Europe may have set the stage for listeners to panic. However, I think the real culprit is simply our own flawed reasoning. Human beings routinely believe outrageous things with little evidence.

Before laughing at the gullible rubes in 1938 who were fooled by the War of the Worlds, take a minute to think about how many of your friends and family share every dumb, unverified "news" story they see on Facebook. Another factor is the "Telephone" effect — you know, the way information corrupts as it spreads from person to person. It very likely played a factor in the panic. W. Joseph Campbell notes that: [I]t is tempting to suggest that what radio-induced fear there was that night was mostly spread by credulous people who had heard muddled and fragmentary accounts about the program and set about to alert others. This Paul Revere effect also offers an explanation for the many distorted, wildly inaccurate reports that circulated that night [...] The great variation in detail suggests that many people who were fear-stricken that night had not heard the Mercury Theatre dramatization but were swept up in a wave of second- and thirdhand accounts.

This is similar to what is sometimes called an "information cascade," or what might colloquially be called "following the herd." First, some rational people make bad decisions based on bad information; and then other rational people make the same bad decisions because they see the people prior to them coming to the same conclusion. These followers assume that the prior decision-makers may be acting on something they know, but the followers don't know, and the followers act not only on what they know, but on what they assume they don't know — especially in situations where time may be a pressure. In the case of the Panic Broadcast, the thought process might have gone something like this for many people: "These people say there's a Martian invasion and that poison death gas is headed this way. That sounds highly unlikely, but they are fleeing the gas and while I could take the time to check the facts before I flee, that could lead to my death if they know something I don't. Better to run away and check the facts from a safer location." There's also evidence that some of those who panicked didn't even think we were being invaded by Martians. There was fear in 1938 that Nazi Germany might attack the US in some way.

Someone who wasn't listening directly to the broadcast, who only heard snippets of disconnected information about rockets, poison gas and mechanical war machines could easily plug in their own assumptions about who was responsible. Nazis were a more likely villain than Martians to be behind such an attack. While there was definitely some localized panic caused by the Mercury Theatre's production of The War of the Worlds, the idea of a nationwide panic over invading aliens is simply overblown. The Panic Broadcast more a lesson about the way incomplete information can spread amongst a receptive but less informed audience than it is a dire warning about the power of the media. It's also a lesson to us all that when we hear a story we find hard to believe, we should always be skeptical. Or as Welles said at the end of the program: So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. . .it's Hallowe'en. Cite this article: Hudson, A. "The War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast." Skeptoid Podcast.

Skeptoid Media, 28 Oct 2014. Web. 19 Jan 2017. < References & Further Reading Bartholowmew, R. E. "The Martian Panic Sixty Years Later: What Have We Learned?" Skeptical Inquirer. 1 Dec. 1998, Volume 22, No. 6. Campbell, W. Joseph. Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. Berkley, CA: University of California, 2010. Holmsten, B., Lubertozzi, A. The Complete War of the Worlds. Napierville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001. Pooley, J, Socolow, M. "The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic." Slate. The Slate Group, 28 Oct. 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2014. < Pooley, J., Socolow, M. "War of the Words: The Invasion from Mars and Its Legacy for Mass Communication Scholarship." War of the Worlds to Social Media: Mediated Communication in Times of Crisis. 21 Jul.

2013, 1st ed.: 35-56. Socolow, M. "The Hyped Panic Over the War of the Worlds." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 24 Oct. 2008, Vol. 55, No. 9: Web. Copyright ©2017 Skeptoid Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Rights and reuse information The Infamous "War of the Worlds" Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke | History | Smithsonian Contact Privacy Policy Terms of Use The Infamous "War of the Worlds" Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke Orson Welles and his colleagues scrambled to pull together the show; they ended up writing pop culture history Orson Welles (arms raised) rehearses his radio depiction of H.G. Wells' classic, The War of the Worlds. The broadcast, which aired on October 30, 1938, and claimed that aliens from Mars had invaded New Jersey, terrified thousands of Americans. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) smithsonian.com May 6, 2015 On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America.

The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired. Welles barely had time to glance at the papers, leaving him with only a horribly vague sense of what he had done to the country. He’d heard reports of mass stampedes, of suicides, and of angered listeners threatening to shoot him on sight. “If I’d planned to wreck my career,” he told several people at the time, “I couldn’t have gone about it better.” With his livelihood (and possibly even his freedom) on the line, Welles went before dozens of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen at a hastily arranged press conference in the CBS building.

Each journalist asked him some variation of the same basic question: Had he intended, or did he at all anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic? That question would follow Welles for the rest of his life, and his answers changed as the years went on—from protestations of innocence to playful hints that he knew exactly what he was doing all along. Buy The truth can only be found among long-forgotten script drafts and the memories of Welles’s collaborators, which capture the chaotic behind-the-scenes saga of the broadcast: no one involved with War of the Worlds expected to deceive any listeners, because they all found the story too silly and improbable to ever be taken seriously. The Mercury’s desperate attempts to make the show seem halfway believable succeeded, almost by accident, far beyond even their wildest expectations. * * * By the end of October 1938, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air had been on CBS for 17 weeks. A low-budget program without a sponsor, the series had built a small but loyal following with fresh adaptations of literary classics. But for the week of Halloween, Welles wanted something very different from the Mercury’s earlier offerings.

In a 1960 court deposition, as part of a lawsuit suing CBS to be recognized as the broadcast’s rightful co-author, Welles offered an explanation for his inspiration for War of the Worlds: “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” he said, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.” Without knowing which book he wanted to adapt, Welles brought the idea to John Houseman, his producer, and Paul Stewart, a veteran radio actor who co-directed the Mercury broadcasts. The three men discussed various works of science fiction before settling on H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds—even though Houseman doubted that Welles had ever read it. The original The War of the Worlds story recounts a Martian invasion of Great Britain around the turn of the 20th century. The invaders easily defeat the British army thanks to their advanced weaponry, a “heat-ray” and poisonous “black smoke,” only to be felled by earthly diseases against which they have no immunity.

The novel is a powerful satire of British imperialism—the most powerful colonizer in the world suddenly finds itself colonized—and its first generation of readers would not have found its premise implausible. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed a series of dark lines on the Martian surface that he called canali, Italian for “channels.” In English, canali got mistranslated to “canals,” a word implying that these were not natural formations—that someone had built them. Wealthy, self-taught astronomer Percival Lowell popularized this misconception in a series of books describing a highly intelligent, canal-building Martian civilization. H. G. Wells drew liberally from those ideas in crafting his alien invasion story—the first of its kind—and his work inspired an entire genre of science fiction. By 1938, The War of the Worlds had “become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories,” as Orson Welles told the press the day after his broadcast.

After Welles selected the book for adaptation, Houseman passed it on to Howard Koch, a writer recently hired to script the Mercury broadcasts, with instructions to convert it into late-breaking news bulletins. Koch may have been the first member of the Mercury to read The War of the Worlds, and he took an immediate dislike to it, finding it terribly dull and dated. Science fiction in the 1930s was largely the purview of children, with alien invaders confined to pulp magazines and the Sunday funnies. The idea that intelligent Martians might actually exist had largely been discredited. Even with the fake news conceit, Koch struggled to turn the novel into a credible radio drama in less than a week. On Tuesday, October 25, after three days of work, Koch called Houseman to say that War of the Worlds was hopeless. Ever the diplomat, Houseman rang off with the promise to see if Welles might agree to adapt another story. But when he called the Mercury Theatre, he could not get his partner on the phone.

Welles had been rehearsing his next stage production—a revival of Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death—for 36 straight hours, desperately trying to inject life into a play that seemed destined to flop. With the future of his theatrical company in crisis, Welles had precious little time to spend on his radio series. With no other options, Houseman called Koch back and lied. Welles, he said, was determined to do the Martian novel this week. He encouraged Koch to get back to work, and offered suggestions on how to improve the script. Koch worked through the night and the following day, filling countless yellow legal-pad pages with his elegant if frequently illegible handwriting. By sundown on Wednesday, he had finished a complete draft, which Paul Stewart and a handful of Mercury actors rehearsed the next day. Welles was not present, but the rehearsal was recorded on acetate disks for him to listen to later that night. Everyone who heard it later agreed that this stripped-down production—with no music and only the most basic sound effects—was an unmitigated disaster.

This rehearsal recording has apparently not survived, but a copy of Koch’s first draft script—likely the same draft used in rehearsal—is preserved among his papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. It shows that Koch had already worked out much of the broadcast’s fake news style, but several key elements that made the final show so terrifyingly convincing were missing at this stage. Like the original novel, this draft is divided into two acts of roughly equal length, with the first devoted to fake news bulletins about the Martian invasion. The second act uses a series of lengthy monologues and conventional dramatic scenes to recount the wanderings of a lone survivor, played by Welles. Most of the previous Mercury broadcasts resembled the second act of War of the Worlds; the series was initially titled First Person Singular because it relied so heavily on first-person narration. But unlike the charming narrators of earlier Mercury adaptations such as Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist of The War of the Worlds was a passive character with a journalistic, impersonal prose style—both traits that make for very boring monologues. Welles believed, and Houseman and Stewart agreed, that the only way to save their show was to focus on enhancing the fake news bulletins in its first act.

Beyond that general note, Welles offered few if any specific suggestions, and he soon left to return to Danton’s Death. In Welles’s absence, Houseman and Stewart tore into the script, passing their notes on to Koch for frantic, last minute rewrites. The first act grew longer and the second act got shorter, leaving the script somewhat lopsided. Unlike in most radio dramas, the station break in War of the Worlds would come about two-thirds of the way through, and not at the halfway mark. Apparently, no one in the Mercury realized that listeners who tuned in late and missed the opening announcements would have to wait almost 40 minutes for a disclaimer explaining that the show was fiction. Radio audiences had come to expect that fictional programs would be interrupted on the half-hour for station identification. Breaking news, on the other hand, failed to follow those rules. People who believed the broadcast to be real would be even more convinced when the station break failed to come at 8:30 p.m. These revisions also removed several clues that might have helped late listeners figure out that the invasion was fake. Two moments that interrupted the fictional news-broadcast with regular dramatic scenes were deleted or revised.

At Houseman’s suggestion, Koch also removed some specific mentions of the passage of time, such as one character’s reference to “last night’s massacre.” The first draft had clearly established that the invasion occurred over several days, but the revision made it seem as though the broadcast proceeded in real-time. As many observers later noted, having the Martians conquer an entire planet in less than 40 minutes made no logical sense. But Houseman explained in Run-Through, the first volume of his memoirs, that he wanted to make the transitions from actual time to fictional time as seamless as possible, in order to draw listeners into the story. Each change added immeasurably to the show’s believability. Without meaning to, Koch, Houseman, and Stewart had made it much more likely that some listeners would be fooled by War of the Worlds. No one involved with Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds expected to deceive listeners to the degree that they did. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) Welles rehearses at the mic. (© Corbis) Welles made national news the day after broadcasting The War of the Worlds. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) Welles explains the broadcast to reporters.

(© Bettmann/CORBIS) William Dock, 76, stands ready with his trusty shotgun to ward off the attack of any strange creatures from Mars, who were supposed to have landed in Grovers Mill during an "invasion" of the country. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) Grovers Mill is shown intact the day after the broadcast. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) Other important changes came from the cast and crew. Actors suggested ways of reworking the dialogue to make it more naturalistic, comprehensible, or convincing. In his memoirs, Houseman recalled that Frank Readick, the actor cast as the reporter who witnesses the Martians’ arrival, scrounged up a recording of the Hindenburg disaster broadcast and listened to it over and over again, studying the way announcer Herbert Morrison’s voice swelled in alarm and abject horror. Readick replicated those emotions during the show with remarkable accuracy, crying out over the horrific shrieks of his fellow actors as his character and other unfortunate New Jerseyites got incinerated by the Martian heat-ray. Ora Nichols, head of the sound effects department at the CBS affiliate in New York, devised chillingly effective noises for the Martian war machines.

According to Leonard Maltin’s book The Great American Broadcast, Welles later sent Nichols a handwritten note, thanking her “for the best job anybody could ever do for anybody.” Although the Mercury worked frantically to make the show sound as realistic as possible, no one anticipated that their efforts would succeed much too well. CBS’s legal department reviewed Koch’s script and demanded only minor changes, such as altering the names of institutions mentioned in the show to avoid libel suits. In his autobiography, radio critic Ben Gross recalled approaching one of the Mercury’s actors during that last week of October to ask what Welles had prepared for Sunday night. “Just between us, it’s lousy,” the actor said, adding that the broadcast would “probably bore you to death.” Welles later told the Saturday Evening Post that he had called the studio to see how things were shaping up and received a similarly dismal review. “Very dull. Very dull,” a technician told him. “It’ll put ’em to sleep.” Welles now faced disaster on two fronts, with both his theatrical company and his radio series marching toward disaster. Finally, War of the Worlds had gained his full attention.

* * * Midafternoon on October 30, 1938, just hours before airtime, Welles arrived in CBS’s Studio One for last-minute rehearsals with the cast and crew. Almost immediately, he lost his temper with the material. But according to Houseman, such outbursts were typical in the frantic hours before each Mercury Theatre broadcast. Welles routinely berated his collaborators—calling them lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and many other insults—all while complaining of the mess they’d given him to clean up. He delighted in making his cast and crew scramble by radically revising the show at the last minute, adding new things and taking others out. Out of the chaos came a much stronger show. One of Welles’s key revisions on War of the Worlds, in Houseman’s view, involved its pacing. Welles drastically slowed down the opening scenes to the point of tedium, adding dialogue and drawing out the musical interludes between fake news bulletins. Houseman objected strenuously, but Welles overruled him, believing that listeners would only accept the unrealistic speed of the invasion if the broadcast started slowly, then gradually sped up.

By the station break, even most listeners who knew that the show was fiction would be carried away by the speed of it all. For those who did not, those 40 minutes would seem like hours. Another of Welles’s changes involved something cut from Koch’s first draft: a speech given by “the Secretary of War,” describing the government’s efforts to combat the Martians. This speech is missing from the final draft script, also preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society, most likely because of objections from CBS’s lawyers. When Welles put it back in, he reassigned it to a less inflammatory Cabinet official, “the Secretary of the Interior,” in order to appease the network. But he gave the character a purely vocal promotion by casting Kenneth Delmar, an actor whom he knew could do a pitch-perfect impression of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1938, the major networks expressly forbade most radio programs from impersonating the president, in order to avoid misleading listeners. But Welles suggested, with a wink and a nod, that Delmar make his character sound presidential, and Delmar happily complied. These kinds of ideas only came to Welles at the last minute, with disaster waiting in the wings.

As Richard Wilson observed in the audio documentary Theatre of the Imagination, radio brought out the best in Welles because it “was the only medium that imposed a discipline Orson would recognize, and that was the clock.” With the hours and then the minutes before airtime ticking away, Welles had to come up with innovative ways to save the show, and he invariably delivered. The cast and crew responded in kind. Only in these last minute rehearsals did everyone begin to take War of the Worlds more seriously, giving it their best efforts for perhaps the first time. The result demonstrates the special power of collaboration. By pooling their unique talents, Welles and his team produced a show that frankly terrified many of its listeners—even those who never forgot that the whole thing was just a play. * * * At the press conference the morning after the show, Welles repeatedly denied that he had ever intended to deceive his audience. But hardly anyone, then or since, has ever taken him at his word. His performance, captured by newsreel cameras, seems too remorseful and contrite, his words chosen much too carefully. Instead of ending his career, War of the Worlds catapulted Welles to Hollywood, where he would soon make Citizen Kane.

Given the immense benefit Welles reaped from the broadcast, many have found it hard to believe that he harbored any regrets about his sudden celebrity. In later years, Welles began to claim that he really was hiding his delight that Halloween morning. The Mercury, he said in multiple interviews, had always hoped to fool some of their listeners, in order to teach them a lesson about not believing whatever they heard over the radio. But none of Welles’s collaborators—including John Houseman and Howard Koch—ever endorsed such a claim. In fact, they denied it over and over again, long after legal reprisals were a serious concern. The Mercury did quite consciously attempt to inject realism into War of the Worlds, but their efforts produced a very different result from the one they intended. The elements of the show that a fraction of its audience found so convincing crept in almost accidentally, as the Mercury desperately tried to avoid being laughed off the air. War of the Worlds formed a kind of crucible for Orson Welles, out of which the wunderkind of the New York stage exploded onto the national scene as a multimedia genius and trickster extraordinaire.

He may not have told the whole truth that Halloween morning, but his shock and bewilderment were genuine enough. Only later did he realize and appreciate how his life had changed. As we mark the centennial of Welles’s birth in 1915, we should also remember his second birth in 1938—the broadcast that, because of his best efforts but despite his best intentions, immortalized him forever as “the Man from Mars.” Like this article?

Question: Who created havoc in 1938, when his radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds was believed to be true?
Answer: Orson Welles